Email's untapped potential for agencies and freelancers

“There is a resurgence in email marketing and an increased demand for marketers, copywriters, designers, and developers.”

Amidst the push for social media as the next big wave for digital marketing in recent years, companies have come to find that email is still the best way to reach their customers. And research shows that customers prefer email above all other marketing channels, especially among the cool kids: millennials. This is good news for agencies and freelancers who are looking for new opportunities for their service offerings. Email marketing has evolved in some significant ways. Primarily when it comes to the tools available. And what you're able to do with those tools changes the entire digital marketing landscape.

"...companies have come to find that email is still the best way to reach their customers."

Marketers and workflow automation

As an email marketer, your work involves creating customer journeys, from the point that you get their email address as interested prospects to turning them into customers, return customers, and loyal fans.

As with online marketing, there are many tools available to do this, including online apps that automate the process by allowing you to prepare emails ahead of time and schedule when they're sent out. Taking that further, you can segment your email list and send specific emails to different groups of people.

You'll also learn about the various types of emails to use for different ways to communicate with your audience: event-based, behavioral, transactional and promotional, etc. And track interaction with your emails that you can use the data from to do even more.

Copywriters and content personalization

When writing content for emails, the thing you need to keep in mind is how your audience uses email compared to other forms of marketing. They browse a website while distracted by other browser tabs they need to get to, quickly scroll through their social media feed, maybe glance at an ad. But getting permission from them to deliver to their email inbox means you have their undivided attention.

With the data collected in time from an email list, along with CRM data for leads and customers, there is the ability to customize email content specific to audience segments, and even individuals. This means a different way to think about how you write your content. And the marketing use cases are very powerful.

Designers and the mix of ad creative and web page

The design of a marketing email is a mix of strong visuals and engaging content formatting that resembles more of a marketing landing page on a website. But the canvas of an email is more constrained, so the use of graphics and content can be more controlled, similar to an ad creative.

Like web pages, you can also utilize modular design patterns for a visual hierarchy, focusing on content and messaging with the primary method of interaction being call-to-action buttons and links.

Developers and coding email like the web

For a developer, coding a CSS/HTML email marketing campaign has always meant messy code. While this is still often the case, there are now better tools you can use to build with and maintain your code. You can develop a code snippet library in your editor or use a framework system to compile your code into email-friendly code.

Instead of web browsers, you test for email service providers like Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook (the Internet Explorer of emails). But there are tools that can do the testing automatically for you across all the email providers available, including for mobile.

Continued evolution of the email revolution

Do any of these tasks sound like something you can include as part of your services? The industry is continuing to evolve and as you get the essentials figured out, you soon find ways to improve your workflow and find ways to enhance email output.

One example is with using an email template system which allows for the reuse of an email's creative once it's been built. It can enhance your email marketing workflow and save a lot of production time in the process. You can also check out our email content editor, Blocks Edit which allows you to build emails based on a template without requiring you to code anything.

It really is an exciting time for email marketing. If only because since its invention, we've realized that email is not going away anytime soon!